Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday July 30, 2010 @12:14PM
from the do-as-i-say dept.

omarlittle writes "The US Copyright Group — a company owned by intellectual property lawyers, which has been in the news for threatening downloaders of the movie Hurt Locker — has apparently stolen their site from a competitor. At one point, even the competitor's phone number and copyright statement were copied word for word on USCG's 'settlement' website. The competitor is reportedly going to send a Cease & Desist."

TFA doesn't mention any developers involved. Why don't you add to our knowledge and name them, since you seem to be better-informed?

A wholesale lifting of code (such as would be implied by their leaving their victim's phone number intact) could as easily have been done by a lazy, recklessly indifferent lawyer or lazy, supervised staff worker as by a lazy third-party web developer.

Moreover I really doubt there's a legally viable argument that USCG, filled with state-licensed members of the bar, doesn't ultimately have responsibility for approving and operating a website that collects evidence for use in court.

This is mostly false, at least in the U.S. While the U.K. and other Commonwealth countries have the concept of copyright for "typographical arrangement," the U.S. does not. It also does not have copyright in the printed appearance of a font (as opposed to, say, the TrueType encoding of a font, which is copyrightable). So, out of your list, only the graphics (assuming they are original) would be clearly subject to copyright in the U.S.